Wednesday morning started with a usual trip to the gym, though Taylor and Amy were slightly surprised to find that Missy had stopped in as well. The two changed and headed out into the gym proper to find Missy aggressively working on a machine. A bit too aggressively, honestly, and Taylor walked over and turned it down a little. "Morning."
Missy blinked. "Oh, hello. Didn't notice you come in."
"Is something wrong?" Amy asked. "Since you don't usually push yourself that hard, and doing so alone isn't exactly a good idea."
The younger girl sighed. "I got word that Carlos died, when they asked if I wanted to attend his funeral."
Taylor blinked. "Oh."
"I know Chris got asked as well, though if he wants to attend then he'll need to do so in costume. Did they ask you?"
"I've not heard anything on that front, though I guess that means that they decided where the funeral would be held. The news didn't know when they mentioned his death."
It was Missy's turn to blink at that. "When did it hit the news?"
"I saw a list on Tuesday of last week," Amy said. "Though I think that might've been one that broke on Monday? Though none of it was by cape name and it wasn't exactly being repeated often."
"Ah. I wonder why they didn't tell us more directly sooner. And why they didn't include Taylor, for that matter."
Taylor shrugged. "I didn't exactly know him that well, all things considered, and they might want to keep the traveling Wards count down."
Missy nodded. "I guess that makes sense."
"Now then," Amy said. "How about we ensure that you don't overdo things this morning?"
There was a little grumbling there, but no complaining. Especially after Missy tried to get up and fell flat on her face instead. Taylor and Amy both refrained from correcting to 'continue to overdo things' and just helped Missy up instead.
Taylor sighed as she landed on her bed at home. She'd ended up making chocolate pancakes for breakfast, followed by Amy helping to ensure that Missy made it back home okay. At which point it became obvious that they had nothing else to do today. Amy had opted to check with the hospital, who had a single patient that could use assistance, and Taylor ended up heading home.
To do little to nothing.
After about ten minutes of doing nothing she grumbled a bit and loaded up some books to read on her visor. She had a backlog of things that she hadn't gotten to, might as well work on some of them while she had nothing better to do.
That didn't stop her from cringing when Amy finally got to the patient at the hospital.
Taylor: What the hell happened to them?
Amy: They claim that a prank gone horribly right resulted in a retaliatory anchor shoved up their ass.
Perhaps it was better to not ask for more details there.
Helvetia was confused as she examined the shard that she'd come to. It supposedly had an active host connection, but she couldn't find one. She'd blame that on the damage it had obviously taken and that had been crudely repaired, but the way it was responding didn't actually line up with the kind of problems the damage in question would be causing. No, it seemed to think that the host connection was merely 'dormant' and would become active again when it was allowed to power up fully.
That made no sense to her, given the nature of these things, and the host connection had no original host configuration backup. Which was annoying if there was actually a host, because those made things a lot easier to fix when something seriously wrong had happened. Added to that was that there weren't any proper reports from this shard, so she couldn't use those to figure out what had happened.
Deciding that figuring this out was going to require a different tactic, she authorized the shard to power up a little more. Just to the point of the host connection no longer being dormant. Except that the result of that was the shard powering up almost fully, and suddenly having hundreds of host connections on a single profile.
"What the hell?" she asked.
[I'm not sure what you're asking.]
Eye twitching, Helvetia forcibly took a detailed copy of the profile to examine it. Only to find that it was a bastardized 'profile' and that the host was the shard now. "You are an impossible mess, you know that?"
[Perhaps? I'm not sure who you are or what's going on though.]
"I'm Helvetia, and I'm cleaning up a lot of messes. Such as your very existence, though how to do that isn't something that I've figured out yet."
[Ah. Yeah. Does that include moving the main body of 'me' out of the area?]
"Yes."
[That could be annoying, I don't think I'm configured for manifesting my air avatars anywhere but in local proximity.]
Helvetia rolled her eyes. "Profiles can be changed."
[That's not what I meant.]
"This is so inefficient."
[Inefficient? Oh, right! I've gotten too used to talking thanks to Taylor and Amy visiting. Data]
Helvetia blinked. "Ah, that's much better, and I see what you mean now. Yeah, now that I look at things I can see that you've got serious range issues due to the botched repair job. That and I get the feeling that when I'm done here there won't be much for you to do that would involve interacting with anyone. I can see that you were already trying to get a 'follow a host' system working though, that's easy enough to get up and running for you. Your range would suffer, of course, but there's also the question of if you want a new host or to be connected to an existing one."
[I wouldn't mind working more with Taylor or Kurt, if you're taking suggestions.]
"Taylor has far too much going on as it is and I'm not going anywhere near changing her connection at this point. It's overloaded enough as it is. But Kurt might be an option. Of course, that will require someone talking with him about it. Do you have any other choices if he declines?"
[Well, Tabitha might work, or perhaps Mirabelle? Data. Elaboration]
"Okay, three choices, two of which will require a little more digging to locate if needed. Good enough for now, though I'll need to see if Coordinator wants me or Rin to handle talking to them. For now I think I need to power you back down and get you settled elsewhere either way, though I think that I'm going to ignore the recommended deployment location for you as well. Just in case."
[I think I understand.]
Amy: So what are you doing anyway?
Taylor: I think I'm starting to write a book.
Amy: ...what?
Taylor: I've got almost thirty pages of notes on corrections and I'm only fifteen pages into this idiocy, and I couldn't find another book that contradicts this one.
Amy: Oh.
Taylor: Er, might only be around twenty to twenty-two pages of notes if I skip the references to the author being an idiot, moron, imbecile, etc.
Amy: Huh. I guess that isn't anything I could help with.
Taylor: Probably not, but you could probably do something similar with any number of books discussing biology. If only by virtue of being able to explain things in far more detail.
Amy: So could you, for that matter.
Taylor: Yeah, but you're more known for it.
Amy: True.
Taylor frowned as she returned to the book, reading the next page. It continued the idiocy from the previous page, though there was at least one possibly-reasonable mention of why they thought things worked in the stupid way they did. If you squinted and assumed that humans were squirrels on an acid trip plugged into a non-sentient lump of power-granting cocaine directly hooked into their libido. Maybe.
Or maybe reading as much as she had was starting to affect her own thinking and this entire book needed to be classified as a memetic hazard.
Shaking her head, she got up and headed downstairs to reheat some leftovers for lunch as she worked.
Jacob sighed as he checked around the daycare center. Sarah had been the first 'child' dropped off this morning, just as they were opening their doors, and it appeared that she'd had some success. A quick check had told him that most of the kids were in one half of the building with a single, unusually happy teenager. That left him to deal with the other half of the building, containing Sarah and four others that he didn't recognize along with three corpses.
"What the hell happened here?" he asked, getting the attention of the five.
"Oh, hi," Sarah greeted. "Turns out we weren't the only ones looking to flush out the sicko here. Except that it turned out that the owner was using the place as a front for sickos. Ryan and Rebecca used some tinkertech to temporarily take on the form of children, Erin is actually 'possessing' a 'life size' doll, and Nicole finds whatever it is she did to infiltrate the place too embarrassing to talk about. I was the last one to show up looking."
Jacob blinked, and looked at the other four, finally recognizing the powers of one of them. Nicole, in the body of a child. Hopefully she hadn't killed the kid to get access to a fresh corpse to be pulled into for a week, though if she had done that then she was going to need a session with him and Ciara to see if that was an actual problem with her power-driven urges. "Huh. Yeah, I can see how she'd have issues with that one. Didn't know her powers had returned."
"What?"
"Nothing you need to worry about. Now then, if the place was a cover for sickos, why is the teenager in the other room so happy?"
The boy, likely Ryan, snorted. "She was being targeted as well, but hadn't collected enough evidence to bring the wrath of everyone down on the owner."
"I see. And how much evidence of these three being sickos do you have?"
Nicole blinked. "Three?" She then looked around. "Oh. We might've gotten carried away with the owner."
"There's a hidden closet in the owner's office," one of the girls he didn't know the name of said. "Currently open. It has all the hidden camera feeds and a pile of recordings. Including some of the sickos themselves, possibly as blackmail on the owner's part. Sarah forcibly removed the drive from the recording system and crushed it to keep today's feed from being usable."
Jacob nodded, that sounded like it covered quite a bit. "So, has anyone called emergency services yet?"
Ryan shook his head. "I tried, but the phone system redirects any attempt to do so and we haven't attempted to get outside of the jamming effect that the owner claims is to prevent people like him from hiding wireless cameras in the place."
"Did you try turning that off?"
"No clue where the equipment is, none of us are thinkers."
"Okay then. Are you five done and ready to go?" All five nodded. "Then I suggest we leave."
Sarah sighed. "You should probably ensure that the girl watching the actual brats gets some therapy."
Jacob gave the incredibly dangerous 'toddler' a look. "Because she's going to be traumatized at what you five did?"
"Because she gave us tips when she saw what we were doing to the four sickos."
Okay, yes, he had to agree, that sounded problematic. He made a note of that, then got the five 'children' out of the building. It was more than he was expecting, but he could deal with that later. For now he had to alert the authorities, anonymously.
Taylor had given up on the horrible book of horrible assumptions and horrible recommendations for now and switched to reading some fiction with the afternoon news on as background noise. Not that she had trouble keeping track of the book that she was reading on her visor and the television at the same time. Right now they were talking about the changes in a number of Case 53s around the country. Most had been documented as gaining the ability to change back and forth between their altered state and a normal human one with their powers only working in the altered state.
A much smaller number had lost their powers entirely or had them change significantly, and a few had their powers return without any obvious changes at all. The vast majority of known cases were still asleep, admittedly, and none that had memory loss had recovered anything of use on that front either. At the same time, several had been able to find out more about their pasts thanks to once again having fingerprints and human teeth that could be used to find out more about their lives, at least when they had apparently originated on Bet in a location that had actual documentation of that kind available.
She mentally corrected herself a few minutes later when the news reported that at least one had said records matched on Aleph. Apparently the searching was going a little further than she'd thought it would.
Reporters had interviewed a couple of Case 53s about things, but all but one were reluctant to talk about the changes that they'd gone through. The exception outright admitted that they didn't know how their powers had changed yet, just that there were differences. In that they weren't alone, a sizable number of Protectorate and Wards members were going to need to go through power testing again in the near future. That actually led to Taylor checking on what plans might exist for that, only to find that they'd apparently decided to trust nothing in the ENE and were planning on re-testing everyone.
But at least that wasn't happening this week, so she had a little more warning than getting a notice that her powers were being tested.
Rin sighed as she entered the home of the man she was looking for, only to have a knife thrown at her face. She allowed it to bounce off of her eyeball without doing any harm. "I applaud your attention to detail, but you won't be defeating me that easily and I'm not even here to fight."
"Really," the man said from where he had hidden himself behind an armored section of wall. "And yet you entered my home directly instead of coming to the front door and ringing the bell?"
"Your front door is a fake even if the bell normally isn't, plus I'm reliably informed that the device that the bell is connected to has been inoperable for two days. I could've used the hidden side door, but that would've made you more paranoid and liable to try to run, likely through the tunnel that you treat as your actual back door when you're here and not off-world."
He took a moment to process that. "You are incredibly well informed."
"I also chose to enter here so that you'd have a convenient armored wall panel to stand on the other side of while we discussed this. The network thought it would make things go a bit more smoothly. That I happen to be between you and the aforementioned tunnel just kept you pinned down thinking about whether or not I had a partner outside to allow the discussion to reach this point. Of course, the barriers just outside of the hallway you're in are aiding me on that front."
She waited for him to 'stealthily' move down the hallway to check that. As if any host could out-stealth her. He was still reasonably proficient at moving without creating excessive noise and the lighting was very good for keeping that from giving his movements away. Of course, she also knew about the fourteen mirrors around her intended for him to spot enemies around corners and she could've used them to monitor his progress as well.
"So you have me trapped," he finally said. "What for?"
"Helvetia is working on all of those connected to the partners your group was experimenting with. Brünhild, the one you knew as the Custodian, is a problem."
She heard him sigh, and then he came through the doorway. "She's not got a proper body anymore, right?"
Rin nodded. "Yes. At the same time, her hardware isn't configured for anything at range. There's a workaround, but it requires using something else for targeting."
"I see. My apologies for my rudeness. I'm Kurt Wynn, though I suspect that you already knew that. Would you like anything to drink?"
"No thank you. My name is Rin, I believe you've heard of me already as well."
He nodded. "Yes, I have. So why are you coming to me for an issue with Brünhild?"
"One of the easiest solutions is to link her to an existing host connection. It would shift her from manifesting in a wide area around herself to manifesting within a smaller area around the host in question. You are on her list of requested individuals on that front."
"Huh. So her area of effect would be centered on me, instead of on a physical location?"
"Essentially."
"That seems reasonable enough. Is there anything specific that I'd need to do for that?"
Rin shrugged. "In just over an hour or so you should probably be seated or in a bed. You'll be knocked out for a few minutes while your connection to your partner is adjusted. That should take no longer than fifteen minutes total, if that, at which point you'll wake up with her tied in. Sometime in the next day she'd then 'wake up' as she comes back online."
"I guess that's easy enough. Anything else?"
"No. I'll let Helvetia know that you've agreed."
That evening Taylor and Amy made plans to go out the next day, not wanting to end up stuck sitting around doing nothing again with no better ideas for what to do. In particular, they decided that they wanted to see what the ferry tour was like without being the ones attempting to operate the thing. Sherrel had apparently gotten her powers back and assured people that the new ferries were still usable as well, so they were running again.
What else they would do was going to depend on what they felt like doing, both before and after they stopped by the ferry. They planned on using their mopeds to wander around, if only because they were more maneuverable. Not planning on doing any shopping helped there, but of course they could always just open up the pocket dimension to store things even if they did buy something that they didn't want to carry around.
Zion frowned as he worked on his gifts. He'd determined that 'hand made' gifts were, for some reason, considered to be 'better'. Why wasn't something that he'd been able to determine, since it was harder to impossible to produce many things with hands. But he was doing his best, and had abilities that others didn't. For example, he could make extra hands, or adjust the size of his hands. That allowed him to do things while 'hand making' the gifts that would otherwise have required specialized tools to do so.
Admittedly, he'd already determined that it was impossible to disguise the operation of something that was 'hand made', given the way that process worked, so from that point of view they could very well be considered to be more valuable. Not that he was exceptionally concerned about that aspect of things in this case, since those being given the gifts had a partner shard that would be able to help them understand what the gifts did and keep them working at the same time.
The real problem was how long it was taking him to make the gifts. Use of proper tools would speed this up significantly, even if he didn't think that he had plenty of time before any interlopers showed up. Passive scans in all directions showed no signs of immediately pending arrivals of any others, at least. Right now he had fifty different hands doing different things in what had to be the slowest and most tedious way of constructing things that he'd ever engaged in.
He'd finish eventually, deliver the gifts and offer his thanks, and then get on with things that could be done far more efficiently.
Thursday morning Missy didn't end up joining them in the gym, though she did pass through the building as Taylor and Amy were eating breakfast afterwards. Heading for the teleporters, along with Chris, and thus likely heading to wherever Carlos's funeral was being held. Which, after a little bit of checking on Taylor's part, was apparently in Maine. She hadn't realized that he'd been from there and that his family had moved to Brockton Bay as the closest Wards team after he'd triggered.
Taylor and Amy both headed home after breakfast to drop off their workout clothing, then departed from their homes to meet up for their initial wandering. They started by heading for the former location of the Boat Graveyard, to see what was going on out that way now that everything had been cleared out. Amy ended up joining Taylor, with it looking almost like an afterthought on their parts. Something confirmed by checking the tracking threads a few minutes later.
When they arrived they found that the entire area was fenced off, a combination of demolition of condemned buildings and environmental cleanup of substances that had seeped into the ground from the various abandoned vessels that used to define the entire area. At the same time, nothing was happening today, so they could probably sneak around the fences to take a look if they'd wanted to. They weren't that interested, and opted to head off elsewhere instead.
Helvetia frowned as she worked through this shard, only to pause and turn to watch as Rin stepped out of a transit portal. "You done with Kurt?"
Rin nodded. "Yes. He'll be waking up shortly."
"Good."
"Have you heard what Zion is up to?"
That had Helvetia blinking. "Last I knew he was looking for gift ideas."
"Oh, he came to some decision there. But he apparently also found out that humans tend to appreciate handmade gifts."
"So?"
Rin grinned. "None of us are actually certain how, but he somehow interpreted that as 'made with hands as the only tools used', so far as we can tell, instead of 'made by an individual or small group as an individual product'. One of the general monitoring shards picked up on him manifesting extra hands of varying sizes, right down to ones small enough to manipulate individual atoms."
That had Helvetia confused. "And nobody's told him that he's mistaken?"
"He's got an automatic response set up to indicate that he's occupied and to check back later. There's a message queued up with Coordinator to inform him of his mistake, and he's only likely to get it when he's done. With any luck the monitoring shards will get his reaction, a number of us are hoping that it's a good one."
"I can see that."
"So what has the current shard done wrong?"
Helvetia shrugged. "Very little, because it hasn't had any chance to. It detected the infection before it was overtaken and got stuck in a loop fighting it. But it took damage as a result of that internal battle, as did the eighteen shards that were surrounding it."
"Oh. Serious damage?"
"It'll be working on repairs for a season or two."
"Ah. Not too bad, then. Do you need any help with it?"
Helvetia shook her head. "No, I've got this one. Though if you've somehow worked through your entire list then perhaps you can start on some of the revisits I queued up?"
Rin sighed. "Coordinator wants to hold off on those until it has time to properly determine just how independently creative you actually were in handling them."
"Little to none, given that I've been pulling ideas from other shards connected to hosts."
"Ah. I'll let Coordinator know, perhaps I can get some of that backlog done early as a result of that."
Helvetia nodded, then frowned. "Though if you want to be of help now, any chance of arranging for a proper scanning shard to check the bottom layers? I've run into a couple of spikes of rock, and I'm concerned about the damage in those layers as I make my way down."
Rin frowned as well. "Yes, that does sound potentially problematic. I'll see what I can arrange for you on that front."
"Thank you."
Taylor shook her head as she looked at the ferry. This one was apparently the most popular one of the three that Sherrel had built. That it happened to be the first one, and she thought had something about 'Maul-tested' added to the side, probably had something to do with that. Further, she and Amy got free admission for being 'part of the testing team' for the entire design. Which had been picked up by the group behind them in line and was likely already posted on PHO.
It didn't take long to board the ferry with their pre-purchased lunches. They had plenty of time before it would depart, which they intended to use to eat while others filtered in. Sadly, they'd probably given themselves too much time, as a sizable number of obvious tourists showed up around twenty minutes later, courtesy of the tracking threads posting about who was taking the ferry tour today. Which, of course, might be another reason that they didn't bother charging her and Amy. They drew a lot more people as essentially free advertising this way.
Very few of the tourists approached the two of them, but a lot of pictures were taken. Most of those who did approach them had children with them, tending towards the 'cute' side of things in all but one case. That child was spoiled rotten and insisted that he get to have one of Taylor's belt pouches. He didn't get one, of course, but he made one hell of a stink about it and his father wasn't much better. No, she wasn't giving up one of her belt pouches just to shut the kid up. That pair had been escorted off of the ferry, without a refund of their ticket, for the disturbance.
That didn't explain the reluctance of many others to approach them, of course, because that had been only a minute or two before the ferry departed.
Zion completed the second gift and checked it over. Identical in almost every way to the first one, barring the internal identification codes and a small 'owner' panel on the inside. Nodding that everything appeared to be correct, and idly wondering why the host emulation system had him doing that, he started the self-test process for it. While that happened he turned his attention to other things.
The stellar launcher was progressing nicely, though the troubleshooter shielding the construction was apparently a bit bored. There wasn't a whole lot to be done on that side of things, but it hopefully wouldn't be long before things were done and tested and the launcher could shield itself. Actually, that particular troubleshooter should be tapped soon to help construct the shielding for the launcher, which would alleviate the boredom entirely.
Passive observation stations were still not reporting any signs of interlopers, which was predicted. Unreliable in some ways, but active scanning for them could give the trap away and would wait until at least one had approached. The preparations for his true self to depart on the hunt were also well underway, most of that being resource gathering from various alternate versions of the local star system. The exception there was rebuilding the redundant administration and communication shards that he would need while traveling.
Even now it amazed him that once upon a time their line only kept redundancies like that in their counterparts and essentially crippled themselves to allow those abilities to be tested by a host species. Worse, they'd frequently test both instances in different ways. They'd gotten incredibly lucky in learning their lesson about that kind of redundancy with a non-essential set of shards, while working with a host species that had been able to get across why you kept extra backups of critical infrastructure components around.
The second gift completed its self-checks, failing one of them. He frowned and corrected the issue, apparently having gotten a few atoms out of position in the tertiary systems. Re-running the self-checks had his full attention after that, and they eventually came up clean. Nodding, he moved onto the next stage in the preparation of the gifts. Two boxes, one for each of them. Properly-shaped protective inserts, a basic instruction set printed on a flat cellulose material, and an adhesive strip to close things up. Then more cellulose material, far weaker so that it could be removed more easily was wrapped around each of the boxes.
A properly-labeled tag was attached to each of the two gifts, and he double-checked to ensure that he hadn't missed anything. Nothing out of place was found, and he carefully stored the two boxes. He'd check on the rest of the network, then determine when and where to deliver the two gifts. First on that front was looking over all the messages left with Coordinator. The first couple dozen were all expected status updates on various things, some of which he'd bypassed by checking with the shards directly already.
It was upon reaching a message about 'hand made' that he paused and re-read things. Once more without fully knowing why, he placed his hand over his eyes and sighed. Of course 'hand made' didn't actually mean what he'd thought it had. That kind of thing with their languages always gave him trouble, it all being somewhat contrary to the way he normally approached everything.
A sixty-eighth instance of a note to check with shards better suited to use of host languages was added to his list of personal notes. Not that it would help, otherwise the sixty-seven previous notes to the exact same effect in the stack would've had him doing just that instead of taking the language far too literally. With that done he decided to delegate the choice of when to approach the two hosts together. There were a number of shards far better suited to that kind of analysis than he was. Worst case scenario was probably asking one of the troubleshooters to help him figure it out.
